Teacher Burnout Turnaround: Strategies for Empowered Teachers

by Tish Jennings

Selected as a "Favorite Book for Educators in 2020" by Greater Good Magazine . Stress and burnout are eroding teachers’ motivation, performance, quality of classroom interactions, and relationships with students, as well as their commitment to the profession. Principals are leaving in droves, and teacher shortages are becoming the new normal. Our teachers are underappreciated and our schools underresourced. But, as the author of Mindfulness for Teachers and The Trauma-Sensitive Classroom points out, educators themselves have the power to alter this downward spiral. Educational psychologist Tish Jennings presents a matrix of stress-causing factors that lead to burnout, and shows how teachers can tackle the sources of stress at each pressure point. From the development of social and emotional competencies―so important to teachers and students alike―to the achievement of systemic change through collective efficacy, she offers hope and practical remedies for overcoming a toxic trend in education.
10 illustrations

Genres: Education

240 pages, Paperback

Published December 8, 2020

About the author

Patricia (Tish) Jennings M.Ed., Ph.D. is an internationally recognized leader in the fields of social and emotional learning and mindfulness in education and Professor of Education at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. Her research places a specific emphasis on teacher stress and how it impacts the social and emotional context of the classroom, as articulated in her highly cited theoretical article "The Prosocial Classroom." Jennings led the team that developed CARE, a mindfulness-based professional development program shown to significantly improve teacher well-being, classroom interactions and student engagement in the largest randomized controlled trial of a mindfulness-based intervention designed to address teacher stress. She is currently Principal Investigator of Project CATALYZE, a study that will examine whether CARE enhances the effectiveness of a social and emotional learning curriculum. She is a co-author of Flourish: The Compassionate Schools Project curriculum, an integrated social and emotional learning, health and physical education program. She is the author numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters and several books including Mindfulness in the Pre-K-5 Classroom: Helping Students Stress Less and Learn More, part of Social and Emotional Learning Solutions, a book series by WW Norton of which she is editor.

Reviews

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful book. It offers surprises, too. There is considered attention to teacher education leadership, and managing the differences between complexity and chaos.

Covid-19 left its fingerprints on this book, being written and edited during 2020. But that 'crisis' has shown that education has been in crisis decades before a pandemic.

This book is helpful to individual teachers. It is profoundly important to educational leaders. And if ministers of education read it - it would change our world.